Who reads John Banim now? Not many - two centuries after his birth his fame is largely confined to his native Kilkenny (even there his admirers are few enough), and most of the books he wrote, either by himself or in collaboration with his brother Michael, have long been out of print.
Yet in his time he was both a notable and popular writer, and it's fitting that the Kilkenny Archaeological Society are today marking the bicentenary of his birth with a celebration centred around the city's Rothe House.
His subject was the ordinary Irish, whom he wanted to write about in a truthful way, with none of the stereotypical stage Oirishry so common at the time, and in 1823 he and his brother began writing their Tales of the O'Hara Family, a series of novels that enjoyed considerable success and that captured both the reality and the sardonic humour of an underprivileged Catholic class. Of these novels, The Nowlans (1826), the story of an apostate priest, is perhaps the most renowned.
On his death at the age of forty-four from spinal tuberculosis, he was praised by William Carleton as Ireland's finest historical novelist, and if the Kilkenny celebration helps to rescue his reputation from the obscurity into which it subsequently and unfairly fell, it will have served a good purpose.
LIKE mother, like daughter. Earlier this year, Molly Parkin's daughter Sophie broke into print with a steamy novel, and now it's the turn of Erica Jong's nineteen-year-old offspring, Molly Jong-Fast.
So what did she feel when she first read her mother's bawdily picaresque 1973 novel Fear of Flying? "All I could say was `Shit, mom, did you really do that?' "
Now it looks as if Erica will be saying the same back, given that the teenager's novel, entitled Girl, offers an account of parental divorce, pre-teen visits to a psychoanalyst, attempted suicide from a skyscraper, dabblings in cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy, and two serious car accidents.
Molly's editor at Hodder & Stoughton is thrilled by all this: "We've got drugs and sex in the first chapter, and then it really takes off with lots and lots of sex - but nothing involving children or animals." Oh, well, that's all right, then.
Do you care enough to write a short story? The Carers Association, which represents Ireland's carers in the home, has just announced the Elizabeth Newsom Short Story Competition, to commemorate the life of one of its founders, Betty Newsom, who died a year ago.
Association director Eddie Collins-Hughes says: "Betty was an extraordinary woman who cared for her severely incapacitated mother at home in very difficult circumstances. Her own health deteriorated very badly and she died of cancer within a few years of her mother's death."
Her great loves were painting and literature, and in honour of the latter the competition organisers are offering £1,000 and a trophy to the winner. The subject need not be about caring but can't run to longer than 1,950 words.
The closing date for entries is November 27th, and if you want further details, contact the Association at St Mary's Community Centre, Richmond Hill, Rathmines, Dublin 6, or by ringing its freephone number: 1800 24 07 24.
Colm Toibin and Cees Nooteboom will be reading in the Irish Writers' Centre at 8pm this coming Monday. The former needs no introduction; the latter, an award-winning Dutch novelist, poet and travel writer, is on a visit to Ireland, having been invited to read at the Scriobh festival in Sligo.
Books Upstairs on College Green are having a very good sale at the moment. I don't know what's been snatched up and what's left, but the day I was there, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature was marked down from £25 to £12.99 and Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes was reduced from £14.99 to £7.99.
There were hardback originals, too, of Aidan Higgins's Dog Days (£7.99), Timothy O'Grady's I Could Read the Sky (£6.99) and Richard Ford's Women with Men (£6.99).
And, if even just for historical reasons, you might like to pick up Martin Walker's biography of Bill Clinton for £6.99. Written long before any of us ever heard of Monica or imagined the fine mess that Bill would get himself into, this is resonantly subtitled "The President They Deserve".